I have noticed lately that when a vacant building is going to be used by a new business, they tend to completely demolish the old building and re-build it, even if it is going to be the same type of business as the previous business, like a restaurant.
Within the past year, I have seen 2 restaurants torn down, and new ones built on the same site, a grocery store torn down and a new grocery store built, and just last week, an old K-Mart was demolished to make way for a Target.
Is it somehow cheaper to start from scratch and rebuild your new business? Aren’t the costs of demolition pretty high?
It seems to me it would be cheaper to just remodel an existing building, rather than start from the beginning.
For something like a restaurant, I can’t imagine starting over. I mean, there is the building, outfitted with a commercial kitchen and all the various things that go along with that, being torn down and rebuilt. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just remodel and upgrade, rather than destroy what’s there already?
Even if you gutted the building to the outside walls and re-modeled the interior?
Anyone is construction know?
Thanks.
I am a commercial real estate agent and I often sell the
aforementioned types of properties that get torn down vs being remodeled. From a commercial construction POV it is often less hassle and less expensive to simply scrape the site vs working around existing older construction. This is especially true when dealing with large chain retailers who often have very specific construction requirements for their stores with respect to size, layout, ceiling height, dock door locations etc etc.
In many cases (though not all) the costs and
inefficiencies of working around and retrofitting the existing structure and an obsolete infrastructure would be greater than simply starting over.
Astro is correct. I work for an architect. On a project I am involved with now, the client purchased a home with the idea that they would remodel the interior and build an additional master suite and garage. After some initial exploration of this idea, it became apparent that because of the way they wanted to occupy the house (i.e. entertain, spend time outdoors, etc.) that the best course of action would be to demolish the house and build anew. However, the husband of this couple informed us candidly that he would prefer not to give his spouse a “clean slate” to revisit some decisions that had been made regarding the landscaping and location of the house, so we planned, at some expense, to retain the existing foundation walls.
Because of this arguable irrational requirement, Extra time had to be spent measuring the existing foundations, adapting the proposed design to make use of them, investigate and design a series of particular details for how to modify and tie into existing parts of the foundation, engineering calculations of the bearing capacity of the existing foundation, and finally, corrections in the field when the old house was discovered not to be made up of square corners, which had thrown our measurements off.
As Astro said, the case with multi-location chain businesses that they get their economy over the long term by having uniformity of facilities and a branded image rather than over the short term by fitting themselves into buildings “as-is” – the cost of modifying a building (in the absence of historical district regulations or the potential of stirring up abatement or accessibility issues that could remain uncorrected without construction) is much higher than having the slate “wiped clean”
The main reason for this is that labor costs greatly outweigh material costs. Demolition is somewhat labor intensive, but is even more difficult when it only involves specific parts of a building to be renovated. Design costs increase enormously in relation to overall construction when modifications are considered, and the construction itself is a more exacting process, often requiring much more communication with the architects and engineers as new conditions are uncovered. When you add all this to the extra efficiency (from an energy cost, physical layout, specific requirements, parking, etc) that can be gained by starting from scratch and top it off with the perceptual benefit of having a brand-spanking-new building to show off, you can see why razing is so popular.
Thanks, both of you.
That was pretty much what I figured, but I just thought that the demo and rebuilding costs would be pretty high, higher than trying to remodel.
I didn’t even think of the chain stores wanting to be exactly alike.
Obviously, I know nothing about contruction. 
Thanks!
Good thread-yeah, all of these people who watched “THIS OLD HOUSE” are in for the thrill of their lives (if they decide on major renovations to an old house)!
I did it myself-to a 1955 cape house. I would never do it again-the first problem-when you start ripping down wall, and ceilings, you usually are in for many unpleasant suprises-like bad wiring/no grounds, rotted framing memebers, etc. We took down an exterior wall (to put in a sliding door to a deck-and found that the wall had extensive water damage).
Another thing about really old houses (pre-1920’s); these houses usually have been worked over many times-and if the work was NOT professionally done, then you have to repair waht mr. Do-it-yourself screwed up 50 years ago.
My advice:
buy a new house, or else do a teardown and rebuild from the ground up-it is usually cheaper, and you get a new house!
That’s what we are doing now. Our house is a 1950 “tract” house. It actually is in pretty good shape, considering.
We bought it from the original owners, who did NOTHING to it over the previous 40-some years, so we were in for a lot of work. We did have to re-wire the whole house, add phone extensions and an extra line for the computer and remodel the bathroom, install all new pipes, etc. We have added a bedroom and bathroom, and are just finishing up the basement, turning it from a big cinderblock-walled room into a familyroom/playroom.
The main problem is that the outside basement steps are right outside the back kitchen wall, so we can either never enlarge the kitchen and keep the steps, or we can make the kitchen bigger but lose the outside steps. A lot of our neighbors have just made a bigger kitchen and gone right over their steps, but I am afraid we will be sorry if we do.
There have been A LOT of times I wished we could just bulldoze the whole house and start over, but we just can’t.
Oh, well. At least my hubby is quite handy. We’ve done most of it ourselves, so it’s cheaper.
Some property is historic & they can only do so much with it.
Most of the time they need to clean things to bring the new one up to code.
The problem with renovating an existin space is that it’s usually better to tear it down to the bare walls and then build it back out, than to just clear out the area you’re concerned about and try to fit the new work in that place.
Even with drawings you seldom know what behind that wall, and you never know what kind of shape it’s in. I’m a facility manager, and at my last company we renovated a beautiful 1927 Art Deco building into the HQ for an insurance company. The exterior was left alone, except for some touch-up and restoration, but the interior was taken down to the beams. The reason? We had to bring the electrical and plumbing up to code, plus install piping and equipment for a new HVAC system. It’s easier to work in raw space than try to stuff it into partially finished space.